The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

“That was unnecessarily harsh, the old man felt. So he stroked the boy’s head again. Thank you, ancestors, for our physical language that will serve our sons and daughters till we are dust.” 

In “Who Will Stop the Dark?” Sekuru presents a balanced model of masculinity for Zakeo to follow. He may not feel comfortable expressing his emotions in words, yet he is not too emotionally stinted to express affection through touch. This model of masculinity runs counter to the more strict gender roles reinforced by schoolyard bullies and society writ large.

“But he knew the greed of thirteen-year-olds and the retribution of the land and the soil when well-known laws were not obeyed.” 

Like many characters in the book, Sekuru takes traditional beliefs centered on the land very seriously. These beliefs often sit alongside Christian beliefs, reflecting the fluidity of religious practices and attitudes in the Zimbabwean countryside. Hanging over Sekuru and others is an ominous fear of natural forces, which may unleash chaos if offended by humans.

“It had become something that had to be done: the killing of the crow. We would have been glad if somebody had come along and told us to stop all this madness and go home. But there were only the two of us, our obsession, our fears and the crow. It had to die.” 

In “The Crow” the boys’ need to kill the titular bird is left unexplained. A symbol of witchcraft and the occult, the crow would seem like a strange creature for the boys to hunt, particularly given the young narrator’s acknowledgement of the power of supernatural forces. Indeed, the boys ultimately pay for their brutality, as the narrator is haunted by memories of the crow-killing, which is described in terms that make it sound like a botched occult ritual.

“‘But they are going to build it,’ I said. ‘They are going to make that road and then the drums are going to stop beating.’”

Once again, a character explores the tension between traditional beliefs and modernity. While Chemai believes that the mountain’s supernatural power will continue to stymie efforts to build modern infrastructure, Nharo believes that modern technology and industrialization will ultimately overpower the spirits, witches, and phantom drummers who presently stalk the area. However, the story’s conclusion, in which Nharo forces the pair off their path to save themselves from a supernatural goat, suggests that the old ways are far more durable than Nharo initially thought.

“Tendai felt that the sun was very friendly and lovely as it rose, it only got angry as it grew older and climbed higher in the sky. He felt sorry for it. It couldn’t help it.”

In one of two major metaphors involving the sun, Tendai describes the celestial body in such a way that it reminds readers of his brother Magufu. Like the sun, Magufu figuratively ascends into the sky, as he enjoys nominal success as a young professional in Harare. Yet despite this ascent, Magufu only grows more angry, violent, and toxic to the people around him, just as the midday sun scorches the earth. The fact that Tendai does not blame his brother suggests that this was inevitable, given the soul-draining nature of life in the city.

“It is very important that you understand what’s happening to your brother right now. It’s a secret between you and me. Don’t tell your father or mother. You still have an expanding heart. You can accommodate almost anything if you try hard enough.” 

Sando expounds upon the generational divides between parents and children that frequently dominate Mungoshi’s narratives. He suggests that at the center of these divides lies young people’s ability to open their hearts to new uncomfortable realities. Parents, by contrast, cling to the past, whether that means traditional belief systems or the memories of a son before he turned into an alcoholic misanthrope.

“Yes. It was a big knife. Pocket-size, but still big. It evoked a strange fear in him and then something in him happened and he felt very, very sad for his father. The thought came to him that this knife was too big and clumsy to pare one’s fingernails with—because it just came to him that must be what his father needed the knife for—to pare his fingernails with.” 

As his father prepares to murder him, the innocent and trusting Hama is incapable of believing such an event could come to pass. Hama fears not for his own life but for his father’s dignity, as Hama pities him for bringing along a knife that is so ill-suited to cutting one’s fingernails. Ultimately, Hama’s trusting nature saves him, as his father cannot bear to murder a child with such an innocent and generous spirit.

“Lions had long since vanished but he knew of worse animals of prey, animals that wore redder claws than the lion’s, beasts that would not leave an unprotected homeless boy alone. He thought of the white metal bird and he felt remorse.” 

Old Musoni expresses anxieties over modernity in vivid and eloquent terms. To him, the jetliner flying above is a far greater existential threat than the lions and other earthly beasts that once stalked the countryside. The draw of Western technology and the false promise of prosperity are incredibly dangerous in Old Musoni’s mind, and his attitude is borne out by later stories in which young men from rural areas are chewed up and spit out by the city.

“You have given me damn all and nothing. You have sent me to school and told me the importance of education, and now you ask me to throw it on the rubbish heap and scrape for a living on this tired cold shell of the moon. You ask me to forget it and muck around in this slow dance of death with you.” 

Mungoshi’s stories are deeply ambivalent regarding education. On one hand, there is an acknowledgement that education is a prerequisite for a certain kind of success in Zimbabwe. Yet there is only one character—Gatsi in “Some Kinds of Wounds”—who is fortunate enough to obtain professional success through education without succumbing to substance abuse or libertinism. For most of the characters, education is a false promise of prosperity, ripping young men from their homes and their families and leaving them at the mercy of the city’s sins.

“A man stands on his feet and guts. Charms were for you—so was God, though much later. But for us now the world is godless, no charms will work. All that is just the opium you take in the dark in the hope of a light. You don’t need that now. You strike a match for a light. Nhamo laughed.” 

Nhamo’s desire to leave his rural homestead is indicative of numerous cultural divides explored in Mungoshi’s stories. Here, Nhamo distinguishes himself from Old Musoni and the rest of his generation through his rejection of old and new religious belief systems. While some characters are caught in a divide between traditional beliefs and Christianity, Nhamo renounces both as mere superstitions, instead putting his faith in modernity. Although the reader does not learn Nhamo’s fate, one can assume from other stories that this faith in modernity and industrialization is sorely misplaced.

“He was the sun, burning itself out every second and shedding tons of energy which it held in its power, giving it the thrust to drag its brood wherever it wanted to. This was the law that held him. The mystery that his father and ancestors had failed to grasp and which had caused their being wiped off the face of the earth.”

In the central story’s chief metaphor, Nhamo calls himself the sun, flying through the air with boundless energy as he leaves his ancestral rural home behind. Yet for the story’s father and son, the metaphor is a matter of perspective. To Nhamo, the earth “rolls” under him as he flies past the old world, leaving it to the dustbin. But from Old Musoni’s perspective, Nhamo is the sun as it sets, a harbinger of cold and darkness.

“He was tired of looking into himself, of asking himself why he was like this and not like that, tired of examining himself, of finding faults with himself, tired of judging and condemning himself. He was tired of the whole circling process of his thoughts, so tired that he wanted movement—any movement, to feel that he was going somewhere and not just stationary.” 

The unnamed protagonist of “The Lift” is so desperate in his life of poverty and unemployment that he longs for even the illusion of movement. This is what the elevator offers him: a few fleeting moments when he feels like he is moving up in the world. Unfortunately, the gatekeepers of Harare’s professional spheres deny him even a ride in the elevator, let alone a job in one of those high-rises.

“He knew about the Europeans. They were all alike in their dealings with the African. An African would do or was bloody lazy. That was that. If they knew anything about the emotional life of an African it was that he was unstable, a potential rapist and murderer. So he had gone only to save himself regrets later on.” 

This is one of the earliest instances in which a character comments on the racial tensions in Harare between ethnic Africans and White descendants of European colonialists. It is telling that these tensions only emerge when the setting migrates to Harare, as if racism is among the qualities that make the city such a dangerous and toxic place compared to the countryside. In addition, this quote expresses the extent to which Paul internalizes that racism, as he attends an interview for a job he is certain he won’t get, just to prove to some invisible and anonymous White person that he is not lazy.

“Education, Paul thought sardonically, it awes us as did the bicycle, the motorcar and the aeroplane. It is a Western thing and we throw away brother and sister for it but when it fails we are lost.” 

Again, Mungoshi uses his characters to convey his deep ambivalence about education. In many cases, education is a false promise of prosperity, giving students a taste of modernity while failing to deliver on its rewards. It is also telling that Paul groups education in with technologies that came to Zimbabwe via Western outsiders, thus casting education as a tool of the colonizer.

“He wondered what he had done for her. She was talking like his mother, suffering and saying things he did not understand. Why must they receive something else from what he intended to give—and then come back later to ask him for more of what he did not know how to give? He despised her. She had come back only to complicate his world.” 

While many of the stories concern fraught father-son relationships, “Coming of the Dry Season” features a dysfunctional mother-son bond. Having felt pressured by his mother to abandon his home for the soul-crushing environs of Harare, Moab is full of resentment. This resentment runs so deeply that he projects it onto every woman he meets, including Chipo, who wishes only to ease his financial and emotional burdens.

“People could not read his face. It was difficult to read European faces.” 

To the African bystanders who witness the automobile incident in “The Accident,” the European motorist has an inscrutable expression on his face. Given that his countenance betrays neither guilt nor apathy, the bystanders move to project their own attitudes about Europeans onto the motorist. And due to the collective generational trauma caused by European colonizers and the White minority government they established, the bystanders naturally attribute the accident to malice on the part of the motorist.

“They all felt the same thing: once again, nothing has happened.” 

The phrase “nothing has happened” has a double meaning. In one respect, the phrase means that the police—which is led by White men, even though it is largely staffed by Africans—will once again ensure that nothing happens to the White motorist who struck an African pedestrian. In another respect, however, the phrase indicates that the pedestrian’s death, at least in the eyes of those in power, matters so little that it is as if “nothing has happened.”

“They belonged to the depths of the heart of the country and all that I missed. She reminded me of where I came from and suddenly the smell in the room was clearly a mixture of human sweat and soul and grass and leaves as we carted hay for the cattle. Once I knew what it was, I felt at home in it.” 

In at least three stories, a character is overcome by memories of home thanks to a smell. This happens to Bishi in “White Stones and Red Earth” when the smell of his family’s orchard allows him to grieve finally for his dead brother. It also happens to Moab in “Coming of the Dry Season” when the smell of burned leaves is accompanied by haunting memories of his mother. Here, the smell of the pregnant woman reminds Gatsi of his home village. Like with other characters who long ago left home, these memories—evocative though they may be—have little effect on Gatsi outside of the psychological realm. He does nothing to help the woman, even though they come from the same place.

“Rungano had always wanted to be friends with me because we happened to come from the same area, not the same place.” 

This quote expresses an attitude that is common among adult characters who left home long ago. While men like Ngoni and Rungano want to maintain some tie to their ancestral home, they also wish to keep it at an arm’s length, hence Rungano’s desire to befriend someone who hails from a place like his own village, though not the same one. This attitude is also indicative of Ngoni’s place of residence and employment, in that a tree plantation exists in a liminal space between agriculture and industrialization.

“Wherever you go don’t you ever think you will never come back. Your parents are your parents, don’t you forget it.”

This quote reflects the extent to which it is impossible to fully escape the legacy of one’s ancestral home. In this specific case it describes Ngoni’s instinctual fear of Mangazva’s mother, rooted in similar allegations of witchcraft leveled at women in his home village. This theme emerges in numerous other stories, most dramatically in “The Flood,” in which Mhondiwa sabotages his own professional success thanks to superstitious beliefs.

“[H]er husband’s people had branded her a witch and said that it had been she who had killed their brother, son, relative or whatever each of them called the deceased. Also her beauty had been reason enough for them to believe it. You are not made that beautiful without having a crack in you.” 

Of all the women branded as witches in the collection, Mrs. Pfende is the most tragic. Thanks to these allegations, Mrs. Pfende loses her children and is forced to marry Mr. Pfende, who is sterile and unloving. These accusations come to torment virtually any woman who possesses even a small amount of power, including the power that accompanies feminine beauty.

“Superstitions? This is true—at least it was, then, when the Earth was still sacred. We always knew beforehand when anything of importance was going to happen. There were messengers.” 

In the final story Old Makiwa serves as an increasingly drunk Greek chorus, commenting on the erosion of the power invested in traditional beliefs and superstitions. While the unseasonable deluge outside the hut would have once portended some momentous event, Old Makiwa believes that the modern world has left those old beliefs and omens in the past. Ironically, he will be proven wrong, as the rainstorm foreshadows and accompanies Mhondiwa’s rising anger, which culminates in Chitauro’s murder.

“They were looking at him with their minds and that was worse than their eyes because each of them saw different things in Mhondiwa, things that he would never know and none of them would ever reveal to him.” 

Mhondiwa eloquently expresses his insecurity in the company of his coworkers, whom he suspects all believe that he is a cuckold. His present psychological distress fuses with his past trauma related to an abusive medicine man, creating a powder keg that is destined to blow with catastrophic consequences. For Mhondiwa, social and spiritual anxiety intermingle as he struggles to survive the travails of the modern world.